The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Zeyu Zhu, whose interest is in global communication on Twitter between 2012 and 2022. We lack a systematic empirical description of global communication over this decade, which saw a rise of the Global South as documented in politics and economics, but is less well documented communication research.
This project works with a dataset drawn from the 1% real-time Twitter sample as available from the Internet archive; accounts captured in this dataset were geolocated based on their profiles using the Nominatim software; and retweet actions were then used as indicators of attention to and information transfer from one country to another.
There is a very substantial amount of cross-border retweets in each year – usually over one third of the retweet dataset. But how equal is this; how global is it; and what are its centres of gravity?
Inequality in retweeting declines over time: the Gini coefficient drops from nearly 0.8 to below 0.65 over the course of these ten years. A measure of information globality that divides ‘imported’ retweets by the total number of retweets captures both openness and dependency: this increases somewhat from 39% in 2012 to over 43% in 2014, and then declines to below 36% in 2020; as the COVID-19 pandemic hits, the measure rises again to over 38% in 2022. This may be somewhat correlated with global economic patterns, though the link remains spurious. Patterns diverge strongly for Global North versus Global South countries, though: the Global South trend continues to decline, while the Global North trend rebounds after 2020.
Applying a gravity model from the study of economics to these data, and taking into account both country GDP and the number of Internet users, shows a greater importance for the number of Internet users than economic power; geographic and cultural distance also play a role here.
Overall, then, global communication on Twitter had been equalising between 2012 and 2022, but not steadily; 2015 and 2020 were important watersheds. The Global South became less dependent on information from the Global North, and began to export more information to the Global North over time.
